Village Voice's Scores

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For 11,162 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 40% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 56% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 7.6 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 57
Highest review score: 100 Hooligan Sparrow
Lowest review score: 0 Followers
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 4,708 out of 11162
  2. Mixed: 4,553 out of 11162
  3. Negative: 1,901 out of 11162
11162 movie reviews
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  1. Storage 24
    The eventual appearance of creature fodder in the form of a crazy old coot who lives in the storage facility, as well as a sequel-promising closing note borrowed from innumerable predecessors, ultimately exposes Storage 24 as a monster from a familiar mother.
  2. DamNation
    Co-director and narrator Ben Knight interviews activists, officials, social jammers, and scientists, approaching the subject not with outrage, but with humor and optimism.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    [Rec] 2
    Predictably, [REC] 2 is higher-budgeted than its barebones predecessor, which only means that the spectacular degradation of video in scenes where the zombies get in close and start chomping will test the limits of any HDTV. If only [REC] 2's rabid baddies knew how to push [STOP].
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Putin's Kiss
    Though Masha's courage is considerable, her change of heart finally feels too nuanced for Pedersen's streamlined political-drama treatment, complete with persistent intrigue music and scenes of Masha restating her dilemma to friends that seem rather canned.
  5. Da Sweet Blood of Jesus
    Jesus, meanwhile, exhibits all of Lee's weaknesses — clashing tones, careless pacing, the straightest dude's hand-in-pants idea of lesbianism — but also just enough of his might and madness that the Lee-minded shouldn't miss it.
  6. The Red Stuff
    Evocative but ahistorical.
  7. House of Fools
    For world-class lapses of judgment, Andrei Konchalovsky's House of Fools is a berserk overachiever.
  8. Ghost River
    The only conceivable reason to immerse oneself in this inexplicable release is, of course, Huppert. Gravely, she accepts the challenge of delivering a coherent performance in a wildly incoherent role.
  9. Possession
    Possession suffers from insufficient nastiness.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Center Stage
    Pays lip service to the seriousness of craft but won't let us watch the dancing.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Serendipity
    The most romantic New York movie since August's "Happy Accidents."
  12. Bring It On
    She (Dunst) provides the only major element of Bring It On that plays as tweaking parody rather than slick, strident, body-slam churlishness.
  13. Loot
    The bleakness and resignation running through the film can be gut-wrenching.
  14. American Animal
    Bizarre, off-putting, and finally demanding of rubberneck respect, this fish-tank indie never leaves a rather lovely duplex apartment, occupied by an unemployed Everyman (Brendan Fletcher) and his roommate, Jimmy (director Matt D'Elia).
  15. SuperFly
    For all its pulpy, genre-movie intentions, SuperFly is virtually crippled by its own ludicrousness. It incites more giggles than gasps.
  16. Winter in the Blood
    Every time a story thread seems to be getting somewhere, Winter in the Blood vaults to something else, with little regard for the tale’s rhythms — the movie doesn’t feel like a puzzle to solve; it’s a puzzle to assemble.
  17. Gracie
    Firing on all formulaic cylinders, Gracie is heavy with tidy meaning and mealy morality; the most dubious idea here is that if you don't let a girl play soccer, she just may turn to cigarettes, halter tops, and sex with the starting forward
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dark Water
    It fails to deliver the narrative thrill twists its origins would promise.
  19. Ghost in the Shell
    Ghost in the Shell looks great, sounds great and has a gaping hole at its center — where its emotional core should be.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Man of My Life
    The film's arresting beauty--shots of a curtain blowing into a shadowed stairwell, or a meadow of sunflowers, or a head resting on a shoulder--is nearly enough.
  21. The Battle of Pussy Willow Creek
    Despite Civil War homages—hazy vistas, silhouetted cannons, and even the famous Ken Burns pan over still photos—the imaginary heroes never spring to life.
  22. Wolf
    It's refreshing that director Jim Taihuttu is more interested in the humdrum goings on of those who split their time between illegal and legitimate activities.
  23. Detachment
    Movies about teachers are flypaper for overblown armchair crusaderism, and this overbearingly cynical attempt gets my vote for worst offender yet.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Running with Scissors
    Like the book, this deadpan celebration of neurosis makes a valiant effort to repress its comedy--which of course makes it funnier.
  25. Central Intelligence
    Central Intelligence won’t blow you out of the theater, but you might be surprised at how well it works — how genuinely funny it is — given the familiarity of this concept.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Last Holiday
    The most surprisingly satisfying Hollywood comedy in ages.
  27. Insidious
    We need visionaries-but also solid craftsmen who seem to enjoy their work. Insidious is the product of the latter. It doesn't build a better haunted house but, when on its game, reminds us of the genre's pleasures.
  28. Wasteland
    Athale has a flair for guy-pal banter; here, the talk is funny and profane, silly and profound, often in the same breath.
  29. Alone in Berlin
    While not the most formally adventurous or action-packed picture, it is a film of compelling urgency.
  30. Shot
    The gun-control message is so rote that it’s of secondary interest to the film’s ambitious structure.
  31. Chasing Madoff
    Too bad Prosserman can't trust his material: Overloading the screen with aesthetic dross, the director offers up tiresome symbolic imagery of blood-soaked hands, burning money, and out-of-focus documents. Rather than amping up the intensity, these fast-cut sequences prove disastrously distracting.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Iron Lady
    Despite the story's conceit of placing the viewer inside Thatcher's head, she never feels like a real person - but this is more the fault of Morgan's script than Streep's typically studied performance, much of it buried under prosthetics.
  33. Once in the Life
    While the line-readings are often dead-on, Fishburne's movie suffers from the usual one-room claustrophobia and Mametian repetitions.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Princess Diaries
    A modest, enjoyable fairy tale that easily outcharms its animated stablemates of the past decade.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Turkey Bowl
    The director and his actors successfully sell the notion that these are real people whose lives and relationships will continue off the field - and that's more than enough.
  36. My Piece of the Pie
    A feeble stab at topicality from that master of overripe Gallic melodrama, Cédric Klapisch.
  37. Madame Bovary
    Lead Mia Wasikowska looks convincingly miserable in the role of a young wife who's driven to seek her pleasures outside the marital bed, but whatever complexities roil in the character's heart and head are nowhere to be found on her face.
  38. How He Fell in Love
    Meyers allows takes to run long, staging naturalistic conversations on sidewalks and in apartments. The result is hit or miss: We may not know what the characters feel, but we're way up to speed on how many steps it takes them to walk to a bar.
  39. The Longshots
    The Longshots strains so hard to inspire, every moment underlined with a by-the-numbers score, that it ends up totally innocuous.
  40. Exodus: Gods and Kings
    For a story that's pro-poor and anti-wealth, every frame of it looks like it cost as much as human life itself — and that, more than any bludgeoned battle cries for freedom, is the pleasure of the film.
  41. Heleno
    You're stuck daydreaming about a far, far better movie.
  42. The Paranoids
    Maybe it's appropriate that Argentinean writer-director Gabriel Medina's chokingly offbeat debut is as aimless and confused as its prototypical slacker-comedy hero, who seems to have wandered into a glum dramedy with a hazy noirish aesthetic.
  43. The Devil's Double
    Ignoring all but the most obvious tensions in the Uday-Latif symbiosis, Devil's Double is static drama, with Michael Thomas's script establishing relationships as if perfunctorily pressing buttons marked "Father-Son Dynamic" and "Forbidden Love Affair," failing to dignify these themes with individuality.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hacia la oscuridad
    Admirably tough-minded if overstuffed, Towards Darkness delivers on its foreboding title.
  45. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2
    It's about as exciting as watching David Blaine play Stratego and makes you miss the power of the first four films all the more: the uncontainable yearning of the Bella-Edward-Jacob triangle.
  46. We Are the Giant
    Barker's tactlessness wouldn't be so bad if he weren't too high on his own patchwork rhetoric to ask his subjects what specifically motivates them.
  47. The Spy Who Dumped Me
    What’s lost in comedy is not matched by a gain in emotional engagement.
  48. Nicky's Family
    It's a shame the way the film's narrative is undermined by long stretches of soulless re-enactments, by a well-meaning but energy-sapping final tribute, and by haphazard storytelling.
  49. The Sea
    Baltasar Kormákur's wacky version of "King Lear," set in an Icelandic village where virtually everyone plays the fool.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Atlantis: The Lost Empire
    The bulk of the Atlantis scenes in situ are as involving as a chakra workshop.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dopamine
    The premise (does modern neurochemistry debunk love?) is fresh enough, but too much would-be banter falls flat, and the story is woefully schematic.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Secondhand Lions
    The self-consciousness is unintentionally touching, but it wet-blankets the film into a thirdhand lark.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    A Horrible Way to Die
    Bowen in particular stands out, impressively describing Garrick's hairpin turns from comforting his victims to instinctively throttling them, but director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett exhibit less facility with the big picture.
  54. The Tall Man
    Once you get through the flaming, Bowser's Castle–like gauntlet of the rest of the story's implausibilities, you end up in a different movie than the one on the creepy poster.
  55. Tai Chi Zero
    Give some points to a genre flick whose style mash-up reflects uneasy relations between Asia and the West just as its fracas-intensive plot tries to dramatize them.
  56. A Fierce Green Fire
    There's no consistent narrative thread to carry the film from start to finish, and A Fierce Green Fire fails to open any singular intellectual or psychological point of investigation.
  57. Ping Pong Summer
    It's a throwback film in both style and sentiment, and what it lacks in depth, it make up for with warmth.
  58. Justin Bieber: Never Say Never
    It is draggily paced and lacks felicity of form; the 3-D is a rip-off and the songs are pap, save a snippet of Etta James singing "At Last" while Bieber's glossy fringe sways in slow-motion.
  59. Be Kind Rewind
    Although frequently funny, Be Kind doesn't have the same pathos as "The Science of Sleep." (Nothing approaches the loneliness projected by Gael García Bernal and Charlotte Gainsbourg.)
  60. Slow Learners
    While it has a few funny moments (including the uncomfortable date that begins the film), Slow Learners mostly feels like a collection of exaggerated performances of drunkenness and mean-spiritedness that leads to a very predictable end.
  61. Casa de mi Padre
    The humor doesn't only target south of the border. Like any good genre product, Casa also smuggles in rude social criticism.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    300
    It's a ponderous, plodding, visually dull picture, but the blame shouldn't be put on Snyder's skills per se, and has nothing to do with his ambition to blur the distinction between CGI and photography. Frankly, it's the slavish, frame-by-frame devotion to Miller's source material that's the problem.
  63. Any Given Sunday
    Like a visual concussion.
  64. Off the Hook
    Watstein handily directs and edits around his screenplay's sappier elements.
  65. Life of a King
    Life of a King isn't setting out to reinvent cinema, or even a genre, but rather just to be a moderately uplifting tale that makes watching chess interesting.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Mother of Tears
    A once-great director's near-worst work passes through its funhouse plumbing and emerges from the crapper as intentional mischief: self-sabotage explained away as mad genius.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Goya's Ghosts
    The film takes as many plot-twists as "Pirates of the Caribbean"; distinctly Goya in its emphasis on the grotesque, it shows none of the Spaniard's artistic economy.
  68. She's One of Us
    Quickly nose-dives into the ridiculous.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Five Wives, Three Secretaries and Me
    As full of flickering warmth as it is bereft of larger insight.
  70. Splendor
    Might as well be bad TV...Splendor is what happens when a director whose natural mode is subversion runs out of things to subvert.
  71. Little Secrets
    The film's broad performances and heavy-handed moralizing strike a note of condescension sure to be heard by the alienated teenager within us all.
  72. The King Is Alive
    Endearingly pretentious -- as if it swallowed a thick brick of Beckett and can't pass the uncooperative Beckettian stool.
  73. Valentin
    Argentinean director Alejandro Agresti's own specs are rose-colored. This loosely autobiographical tale feels inorganically upbeat, with all potentially upsetting material glossed over or truncated.
  74. Scream 4
    The enjoyable moments are limited to Alison Brie, funny as Sidney's publicist, and the final recasting of the movie as a backstage diva drama. As ever, the self-reflexive horror stuff is superficial, loveless, and constant-a ladled-on sauce to disguise what you're eating.
  75. Dead Man's Shoes
    Dead Man's Shoes is all about revenge, but in trying to be one of those serious revenge films that questions violence while indulging in it, it manages to keep virtually all the characters unsympathetic and uninteresting.
  76. Miss Lovely
    Rife with jealousy, treachery, and violence, it's a stylish portrait of the tangled relationship between cinematic and real-world sleaze.
  77. Carrie Pilby
    In her directorial debut, Susan Johnson balances the character's haughty brilliance and aimless privilege with an underlying vulnerability.
  78. X-Men: Apocalypse
    This film nimbly mixes narrative exuberance and emotional depth, flamboyant displays of power with quietly terrifying exchanges. It zips along, combining the highs and lows of a real comic book – all the feeling, color, and wonder, even some of the dopiness – with gloriously cinematic storytelling.
  79. Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder
    Christopher Felver's stumbling hagiography Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder does no wrong by its celebrated subject-- but it never illuminates him, either.
  80. The Ticket
    If Fluk’s film has any impact at all, much of it is thanks to Dan Stevens, who brings an empathy to James that occasionally complicates the director/co-writer’s two-dimensional view of the character.
  81. The Monuments Men
    The Monuments Men fails in its grand ambitions, but it's still satisfying in bits and pieces, like a busted statue. Even a tribute made of shining fragments counts for something.
  82. The International
    Both actors (Owens and Watts) seem mildly aggrieved (and not at all convincing) at having to play characters considerably less intelligent than themselves in a movie that plays even dumber.
  83. Rudderless
    The result, despite a few stellar moments, is a not-quite-tragic-enough meditation on mourning and self-healing, crossed with a not-quite-gritty-enough portrait of indie rockers trying to break big.
  84. The Producers
    Broderick is a genuine trouper, hoofing his way through his big numbers, while Lane's antics are difficult to resist.
  85. Felony
    The three lead actors are limited by their characters' kiddy-pool-shallow behavior.
  86. Nacho Libre
    Nacho Libre plays like a Jack Black best-of, down to the song he wrote and performs for de La Reguera that sounds like some Tejano version of a Tenacious D throwaway.
  87. Triple 9
    The story isn't complex, but its telling is tangled, often willfully so.
  88. Manolo: The Boy Who Made Shoes for Lizards
    Manolo might be a hard sell to moviegoers who aren’t already interested, but for fashion enthusiasts, it’s an enjoyable confection.
  89. Epic
    Epic certainly manages to tell a compelling tale. Yet in a post-Up era where animated films can pulse with profound truths, the question remains: Is mere entertainment enough?
  90. Paul, Apostle of Christ
    There’s little in Paul, Apostle of Christ that’s not predictable, but the film engages honestly enough with its ideas that at times it feels like a small…well, let’s not use the word miracle in this case. It doesn’t shy away from complexity, and for that we can all be grateful — believers and heathens alike.
  91. Romeo Must Die
    The wall-to-wall rap score is as kinetic as the acrobatic fight choreography, and nothing else matters.
  92. Rat Race
    Zucker's frenzied trifle is painless, with a few decent running gags -- and an ocean of bad ones.
  93. Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!
    A less offensive concoction than Luketic's "Legally Blonde," Win a Date is nevertheless an oddity, unsure of its tone and even of what period it's set in.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Rick
    Rick (Bill Pullman) is an embittered cad who fails to earn the audience's sympathy, so the film falls short of its source's tragic dimensions. That aside, Daniel Handler's script and Curtiss Clayton's direction hit all the right notes, especially in the final act.
  95. Blow
    Hopefully ambitious yet hopelessly lightweight.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Under the Tuscan Sun
    Only Sandra Oh, as the wisecracking lesbian Asian pregnant best friend, provides a bright spot. Get this sidekick her own sitcom!
  97. À cause d'un garçon
    Too breezily, You’ll Get Over It gets over it--the dewy, abrupt optimism of its ending seems wholly unearned.
  98. The Nines
    It's hardly a novel idea, but at least when Kaufman, David Lynch, or Michel Gondry invites us on a tour of his chaotic subconscious, it's a fascinating place to visit. Plunging into August's gray matter is more like a season in vacation hell.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Safe House
    [A] scattered but not totally disagreeable CIA conspiracy thriller.
  100. Janie Jones
    Nivola and Breslin sing and perform the original numbers, welcome interludes that provide respite from Rosenthal's lousy script.
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